Blessing and Favor

Yesterday I spent time in a sober meeting, discussing hour by hour the management of a mother who came into our hospital in labor, and delivered a very stressed and depressed baby.  The infant died about 12 hours later in spite of maximal intensive care.  We examine these cases in detail, review all the vital signs and monitor outputs, clarify what could have been done differently.  It is responsible and helpful, but frankly we aren't in control of every outcome.

So it was particularly encouraging that one of our interns sent us this picture from clinic that afternoon:

This is the mother who was getting CPR WHILE Scott performed surgery to remove her twins.  All 3 would have died 99% of places in Africa.  But the team rallied, OB and Anesthesia, Theatre and ICU, Paeds and Medicine.  And mostly, miraculous intervention by God.  When the mom finally turned the corner towards living, and woke up a couple days later, a nurse and I took her babies up to the High Dependency Unit.  She named them Blessing and Favor.  I wrote about that in a blog a few weeks ago.  Here they are for a check-up, a smiling and grateful and intact family, a dramatic story of rescue.

So much of our days are like that.  A party for Julia while we're on the phone with teams making tough decisions about evacuation.  A child who was in a coma wakes up, another who I thought was going to fully recover from a treatable infection slips into seizures and coma.

It is easy to see God's blessing, and His favor, in the dramatic healings.  It is more challenging to believe in those things during the loss and grief.  And yet we walk through the valley of the shadow of death to a richly prepared table.  Feasting and mourning, juxtaposed, throughout this life.